Night Teacher’s mesmerizing “Past Life” is a warm, gritty fever dream of heartbreak, transience, and self-discovery – an aching inner reckoning off her upcoming sophomore album ‘Year of the Snake’ that blurs the lines between distance and intimacy, past and present.
Stream: “Past Life” – Night Teacher
“What’s the longest you’ve gone without wanting anything?”
It’s a deceptively simple question, but in “Past Life,” Night Teacher’s Lilly Bechtel delivers it like a challenge, a confession, and an opening door. Over warbling guitar and a warm, pulsing groove, the line hangs in the air – equal parts invitation and indictment – as if she’s speaking to someone else and to herself at the same time. It’s a moment of connection laced with disconnection, intimacy shadowed by distance. Her song begins here, in that liminal space where desire pauses and selfhood feels uncertain, and then slowly unspools its way forward.
What follows is a fever dream of passion and pain: “Past Life” sees Night Teacher capturing the strange dislocation of heartbreak and transience – how you can lose the thread of who you are, even as some part of you is keeping score. Written between borrowed beds and unfamiliar kitchens, the track traces that distance with grit, groove, and wry self-awareness, circling the refrain, “In a past life I was a human being,” until it starts to feel like both a mantra and a spell. By its end, Bechtel leads us to a softer place – to locks that turn, stairs that creak, and the sound of someone you love coming toward you – showing that “home” can be as small and certain as the tiniest creature comfort.
Desire rises like snow
on a neighborhood trampoline
a circle of deer sleep underneath
what’s the longest you’ve gone
without wanting anything
what’s the longest you’ve gone
without wanting
Address unlisted, but I’m still here
just until I figure it out
who I am at the sink,
what I say that I don’t mean
who I thought i’d be by now
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering “Past Life,” the second single off Night Teacher’s upcoming sophomore album Year of the Snake, out October 31st via First City Artists. Following the record’s opener (and lead single) “Never Better” – praised for its groovy, good-humored take on the pitfalls of perpetual self-improvement – “Past Life” trades wit for wistfulness, marrying Bechtel’s candid, cathartic lyricism with a gritty, off-kilter sonic world built alongside longtime collaborator and producer Matt Wyatt. It’s a standout moment in a record steeped in transformation, vulnerability, and the miraculous ways we find our way back to ourselves.
“I wrote this song during a time of upheaval, transience, and grief,” Bechtel tells Atwood Magazine. “I was going through a difficult breakup and moving around a lot, often staying in other people’s houses and walking around in other people’s neighborhoods. I felt this robotic sense of distance from myself and other people. I was looking for a sense of home, and thinking more about what that meant.”
“I had seen a Shaman a few years earlier. She had told me this elaborate story about one of my past lives. As cool and bizarre as the story was (I was apparently a queen who poisoned my husband’s mistress), I kept thinking I would have been just as delighted and shocked if this woman had told me that I used to be a human being.”
“I have always been interested in the small, weird miracle of how we sense we are removed from ourselves, because even to sense that distance means we do know who we are. How do we know that we’re gone, and who calls us back? I believe in some power or holiness at work in us, that wants us to return to a sense of life that feels like home. But in my experience, and what I’m trying to convey at the end of this song, is that coming home doesn’t have to be some dramatic parting of the waves. It could be as simple as the feeling you get when someone you love is on their way up the stairs to see you.”
In a past life
I was a human being
in a past life
I was a human being
but somewhere I lost the thread
somewhere I lost the thread
or was it only the feeling
was it always just the –
That intimacy radiates in “Past Life,” where Bechtel’s voice glides between hushed vulnerability and aching assertion, each line a meditation on the way memory, longing, and the body’s quiet signals can lead us back to ourselves. The refrain – “In a past life I was a human being” – becomes both mantra and question, its repetition unraveling the space between who we’ve been, who we are, and who we’re still becoming. The music mirrors this duality: Raw and rhythmic, textured yet tender, a sonic embodiment of being unmoored and slowly re-rooting.
Can’t find my keys,
they’re not where I lost them
I need some curtains for my new place
at Bed Bath and Beyond
I don’t seem to have my wallet
so I go back out through the glowing gates
what’s the longest you’ve gone
without wanting anything
what’s the longest you’ve gone
without wanting
In a past life
I was a human being
in a past life
I was a human being
but somewhere I lost the thread
somewhere I lost the thread
or was it only the feeling
was it always just the…
Directed by Cat Rider, Zap McConnell, and Lilly Bechtel herself, the “Past Life” video mirrors the song’s interplay of intimacy and dislocation with a dreamlike, almost voyeuristic lens. After a brief chalk-scrawled introduction of the title on a wall, we find Bechtel seated at a bar, rummaging through the bag of the woman next to her – a woman who looks suspiciously like her. Out come a magnifying glass and other small, curious artifacts, as if she’s collecting clues about someone else’s life, or maybe her own.
From there, the imagery drifts between grounded realism and surreal reflection: Bechtel holding a small translucent orb – a sort of portable looking glass – that becomes a portal for the viewer. We see her ascending an escalator through the grainy intimacy of an iPhone camera; we seem to step inside the Year of the Snake album art itself, watching her framed within the glass she holds in her fingertips. The shifting camera effects ebb and flow like memory, blurring the boundary between observer and observed, self and other – a visual counterpart to the song’s central question of what it means to return to yourself.
In a past life
I was a human being
in a past life
I was a human being
but somewhere I lost the thread
somewhere I lost the thread
or was it only the feeling
was it always just—
Locks that turn
stairs that creak
sounds you make
on your way to see me
was it always just this feeling
was it always…
If Year of the Snake is about transformation – about shedding what no longer serves and stepping into the next version of ourselves – then “Past Life” is one of its most poignant touchstones.
It’s a reminder that homecoming doesn’t have to be dramatic; sometimes it’s as simple, and as profound, as recognizing the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
Night Teacher’s sophomore album Year of the Snake arrives October 31 on First City Artists. Let “Past Life” hold you in its glow, a song for anyone who’s ever felt far away from themselves and found a way back.
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Stream: “Past Life” – Night Teacher
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© Alea Doronsky
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